People

Avishek Ray (Principal Investigator, India) is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology Silchar. His research pivots around two central thematic: (1) the cusp of literature and history – the interface between narrative tropes and the historian’s craft; and (2) travel, migration and refugeehood. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (Routledge, 2021) and editor of Decolonial Travel: Vernacular Mobilities in India (Routledge, 2025). In 2021, he was awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.

Anne Murphy (Principal Investigator, Canada) is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research has explored memory, history, and material culture; practices of commemoration with reference to the history of Partition and the history and experience of migration; the integration of cultural history and the arts with attention to the politics of representation; and the history of the Punjabi language and its literature. She is the author of The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2012) and has completed a second monograph that is under publisher review.

Debjani Sengupta (Co-Principal Investigator, India) is Associate Professor at the Department of English, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. Her work has explored the way borders, refugeehood and identities have been embedded in canonical texts in Bangla while paying special attention to gendered and Dalit experiences of migration and homelessness in post partition rehabilitation spaces. She is the author of The Partition of Bengal: Fragile Borders and New Identities (CUP, 2016) and is the editor of Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals (Amaryllis, 2011) and an anthology, The 1947 Partition of India:  An Anthology of Writings, to be published soon.

Sarah Ansari (Co-Principal Investigator, UK) is Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has conducted research projects funded by the British Academy, the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the British Council, and helped to establish the Partition Education Group within the wider South Asia Heritage Month initiative. She is the author of two monographs:  Life after Partition:  migration, community and strife in Sindh, 1947-1962 (OUP, 2005), and Boundaries of Belonging: localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan, co-authored with William Gould (CUP, 2019).

Sunanda Kar (Student Collaborator, India) is a doctoral candidate at the department of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,  National Institute of Technology Silchar. Her research explores the convergence of literature, digital media, and digital humanities.

Diyali Bhattacharya (Student Collaborator, India) is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,  National Institute of Technology Silchar. Her research interests focus on epistemologies of identity and their circulation. She holds a Masters' degree in English Literature and Language from the University of Hyderabad.